Asking questions and staying curious

what do we learn about ourselves from others?

Mar 07, 2022

This past Friday, I started doing Portfolio Reviews of aspiring comic book artists at a comic book store near my studio. I was inspired by Steve Lieber, who volunteered to do the same thing in a comic book store in Portland, as a way of helping generate a more active and inspiring local scene.

Hopefully, the people who showed up liked the feedback and the experience and I can continue doing this at least once a month. There’s so much we can learn from our own work when the work is seen by somebody else, be it a fellow professional, an editor or the readers, and sometimes a simple honest opinion makes a huge difference, posing questions instead of offering answers. The questions remain in our head, and they drive us to look for our own answers, for our own paths. Stories are born from questions we want to find the answers for.

Naoki Urasawa, the mangaka creator of such Mangas as Monster and 20th Century Boys, explains on this video, with a few simple but clear examples how to use screen tones on your drawings. Most artists can add such an effect digitally nowadays, but I think there’s a different look when the tones are added on the paper, both in the printed comic and specially when you look at the original art. (unless you speak Japanese, you’ll have to activate the subtitle option on YouTube).

Yet another interesting shoot interview at the Cartoonist Kayfabe channel, this time talking with Ed Brubaker about his career in comics, which begun in alternative comics he both wrote and drew. He is one of the authors I give as an example when aspiring writers ask about how to get started in comics, because he did draw his own comics in his starting years to show the stories he wanted to tell and that helped him show his work and learn the mechanics of comic book storytelling. Maybe he wasn’t the best artist, but it’s so much easier to see if you can tell a visual story when you have visual work to show people. His story about meeting Charles Schulz is a specially nice one.

I did some sketching over the weekend. I was thinking about super-heroes, and dynamic figures, and different interpretations of characters by different artists, and making my own version of that thing I like. (probably seeing a gazillion drawings of Batman everywhere online because of the premiere of the new movie helped making the subject stay alive in my head all week long).

For the longest time, I was sure drawing super-heroes wasn’t for me and that I wouldn’t do a good job at it even if I tried, and it was by seeing other artists I admire doing their versions of characters everybody knows that I started to think about these drawings from a different point of view. At first, I only knew that my art suffers deeply if I don’t like the story I’m drawing. And, as an artists trying to show editors, publishers and readers that I have stories to tell, I focused a lot on the passion for the story, which I still think is the most important thing, at least in my work. While doing that, I forgot my own particular interest in making art and the challenges of visual creation. Only when I got to know personally more artists (both the ones I grew up admiring, or younger ones from my own generation or even the enthusiastic ones younger than me) and got to see and be inspired by their work and the way they followed their muses and kept engaged in their craft that I started to consider that maybe there was a path for me to explore the artistic, expressive and plastic side of my work.

In the first year of the pandemic, there was a great collective effort to make sure the comic book market wouldn’t disappear, and among the many different initiatives, a bunch of authors offered rewards (original artwork, commissions, online workshops, etc…) in online auctions that benefited comic book stores. I offered up one commission and part of the reason I started sketching super-hero images this weekend was also because I finally think I can do my piece and safely deliver it to its (very patient) recipient. As long as I can work out a schedule that doesn’t interfere too much the time I have to work on my books, I can do this piece, and maybe after that I can think about doing others.